Please Mind The ___________ Gap (with Matt Courtois)
We speak with one of our favorite guests, __________ about _____________. An antidote to free talk activities, _____________ are a great way to get students to _______, listen to each other and ___________. ___________ activities can even be used in teacher training. Listen to fill in the _______.
Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast. Today, we invite our regular podcast guest Matt Courtois.
Matt Courtois: Hey, I'm a regular guest now.
Ross Thorburn: Actually it's been pretty irregular for the last six months, but I think you're probably our most prolific guest.
Matt: I'm honored.
Ross: You should be.
[laughter]
Matt: I'm honored to be back again.
Ross: It's awesome to have you back. I thought it would be cool today for us to talk about gaps which force students to talk to each other.
You were talking earlier about doing a teacher training on this topic. What made you choose that as a topic for teacher training where you work?
Matt: Through some classroom observations and my new company, I'd noticed that in every class there's going to be mixed levels of students. I found as a teacher whenever you would just ask students an open question and say discuss with your partner, the same thing happens every time where that confident student tends to be more proficient, but not necessarily.
The more confident student in the pair starts talking immediately and the other one gets more and more lost. They aren't necessarily listening to what the student is saying. Maybe they don't understand what the student is saying and they don't stop and try to understand.
Maybe they're trying to think of what they're going to be saying next. While one person is talking the other person has to be listening, but they aren't necessarily listening if they don't have to.
Ross: How about we divide our discussion into two parts? We can talk about why information gaps are useful. What's the point in having them? Then we can go on and discuss some examples.
Why are information gaps useful?
Tracy: The information gap provides the students a reason to complete it and also relate it to their motivation. For example, I'm so curious to find out the answers when I'm doing it.
Then that's naturally just try to increase their motivation during this learning process. Another thing is maybe, I don't know, provides extended opportunity for them to practice or develop soft skills. For example, you have to clarify something from each other, right?
Ross: You have to check the information that you've perceived is what you think it is, right?
Tracy: Yeah. It's not just only one skill involved in this kind of either activities or tasks. There are so many things happening in the same time.
Ross: How about we start with that before we go into any more detail? What's an information gap?
Matt: I'll give you mine. We can go one by one and see who has the best definition, I suppose. I've explained it as whenever in pair work you give one student some information that the other student needs to figure out.
Maybe that information is given to them in the form a picture. You can give that student a picture and the other student doesn't get to see the picture. You can give the student some text and the other student doesn't get to see it.
Maybe you can rely on the students' personal lives. If I have to interview Tracy about her upbringing, you can assume that one student doesn't know everything about the other student. I need to learn that information from Tracy.
Tracy: I'm just thinking about information gap. It might be easy for people to fall into the trap like, "Oh, I have to deliberately create gaps when they're communicating." It's quite dangerous actually just my pupil is trying to create gaps. When actually it's really about...It's the information that the people need to complete the task or the activity in the classroom is genuine or is real life related.
For example, jigsaw reading. You want to find out what happened in different part of the story, like I want to know more information, like the characters.
Ross: What's a jigsaw reading, Tracy?
Tracy: You have something I don't have and then I have something you don't have.
Ross: We just took a text and we cut it off, basically. We give some of the students one part of the text, some another part, and then everyone has to answer all the questions. Something like that, right?
Tracy: I think it is. Of course, typical information gap activity. I'm thinking when you're running this activity, you don't just want to make it just for the information gap purpose. You probably want to have some other questions the people can think about when they're discussing, not just purely trying to find the information itself.
I probably need to use a language that politely asks my classmates to share the information with me.
You probably disagree because the information you have and the information he or she has is completely different or focus on different aspects. At this point, you probably want to argue or debate it with each other.
Matt: I think even "Tell me what's on your paper and I'll tell you what's your paper," and then you have to come up with something together. There is some incidental language that comes up.
Because if we set it up in the way where I need some exact information from you and if you're expressing that to me and I can't fully understand what it is, I'm going to try to -- I don't know what you call that -- repair that conversation. Repair that interaction.
I'm going to try to get you to paraphrase what you said where I try to get it to some way that I can understand what you're saying. Like a genuine focus on accuracy because you need to understand what the person said, right?
Tracy: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm just saying you don't want this kind of information gap activity to turn into something just for the information itself.
I observe a lot of classes. I also taught classes before. I realize the students they deliberately just want to gather information. There's not much communication between.
As a teacher, you have to emphasize it's not just complete task sheet. It's also sharing the information and to agree with each other on how can you get the information from your classroom.
Examples of information gap activities
Ross: How about we talk about some examples? Another classic one, one that I guess I've done the most, is a warmer or often is a wrap up. If you were going to force me to tell you what's my favorite activity, I'd probably say back to the board where I write a word or a phrase or something on the board and then everyone else has to describe it.
That's such a pure, really simple information gap. Everyone else in the class can see a word behind two students they have to describe it too.
Yeah, I love that. I love doing that at the end of class as a like, "Here's some words or phrases that we learned today." The person in the chair has to think back to which word can it be? Then everyone in the class has to think. They just learned these words, but how can I create my own definition of this word for someone else?
Matt: Yeah, really cool.
Ross: I think something else that...It's so easy to create these gaps in classes face to face. Even just something at the beginning of the class, the teacher can do if they all have the same textbook is just go, "I'm gonna open my book to a page. I'm gonna describe what's on the page and you guys all have to try and guess what page it is I'm describing."
The teacher's using this language ad everyone's looking through the book and trying to find something that applies.
Matt: Another really simple thing you can do as a teacher a lot of times, let's say you have 10 students in your class, if you print out five handouts instead of one for each student a lot of times that's going to really help you to create that information gap. Again, if you set up the activity correctly.
Tracy: Information gap activities might be challenging for young learners. I'm going to observe the class. It's kind of a reading skills focus for this lesson, but the teacher is still using the pictures of the text as a prediction.
Even that, I think the teacher manage to let the students having two different pictures. Then they are trying to tell each other what they can see in this picture and then use it as a springboard to predict what is going to happen in the story.
Matt: With that age group, one of my favorite things to do is a running dictation where you have a text or where you have something outside the classroom. Either the person inside the classroom has some questions, they need to ask the person who can move around and they go and look.
Or with very young kids I've done the thing with the picture before. You just stick the picture outside the classroom. They run outside and they go, "It's got two legs. It's got a head." The person inside is like, "What color is it?" They have to go outside and look again. Yeah, there's a big gap that you can place there quite quickly.
Ross: The natural next step in that once the pictures been drawn is to then look at the original picture and compare it to their drawing. Basically, you can have a really good reflection session if you did the information gap well.
You can say like, "What language could I have used when describing the picture that would have helped you draw it better? Which words do you really need to know the most out of this interaction?" They can identify that themselves.
Tracy: Also with young honors, I love one activity with different age groups. Even with little ones or a little bit older ones and you can try to tweak the activity based on their English level or age group. When we're young, we make fortune teller.
Ross: This is the thing that's got like four corners and you open it?
Tracy: Yeah.
Matt: They're going to see you gesturing and you know exactly what it is.
Ross: Yeah, that's funny.
Matt: The thing is as soon as you do the gesture, I have no idea if people listening will know what on earth we're talking about.
[laughter]
Tracy: It's like a origami stuff. Then you just fold it into a fortune teller. It's a great activity. Of course, you have a, I don't know, one-hour lesson and that can be part of it. You can show the students how to do it. Maybe have the students watch a video, like a one minute. The other half the students they make a list of what vocabulary they have already either learned or they knew about this topic.
After they finish their different tasks, they come together, and then either pair them up or work in groups. The students who watch that video of how to make the fortune teller, we're trying to tell the other students how to make it.
Of course, they will be provided different tools. They can do it. They can show each other. Also, aim this process. They need to think about, "Oh, how can I tell my classmate? If my classmate makes something wrong, how can I remind him or her?"
Matt: You reminded me when I was a teacher. I did some demo classes for new students where I would do a magic trick with playing cards. At first, students would see me do the magic trick. They would think it's so amazing.
At the end, "How do you do it?" Then get a few of the students to come back and stand behind me as I was performing the trick, so they could see how I was doing the magic trick. Then they went out to the rest of the students and talk them in English how I performed that magic trick.
Again, that's the information gap right there. I didn't realize at the time that was what I was doing. I was giving some people the information how to do the magic trick, and then everybody else really wanted to know how to do it because it was a cool magic trick that they could show their kids, or whatever.
Ross: I think that goes back to Tracy's point earlier. Information has to be interesting. "I got to learn this cool magic trick." If you can really bamboozle people at the beginning, go, "Wow. How did he do that?" This is real motivation there. I really want to overcome this gap.
Wrap Up
Ross: Tracy, when you were in teacher training before, I think you used this podcast as part of an information gap. What did you do?
Tracy: For teacher training, I divide the teachers into two groups. Each group listen to one podcast. Then the podcast focus on the different areas of language teaching and learning. Each group actually has some questions they need to find the information.
Then I get them back. They have to share the information that they listened, then try to exchange the information that they got out of the podcast. Number one is definitely very efficient because they are doing the same thing. Folks on different content at the same time. They come back and then exchange.
Number two, when they're sharing the information -- there will be a lot more information come out when they're talking to each other -- is a great springboard, not just for sharing the information related to the podcast, but also about their experience, about their opinion. It generates a lot of discussion.
Ross: You were saying earlier the information is hopefully useful and important to learn if they're new teachers. There's your motivation.
Matt Courtois, thank you for coming back and recording with us again in a third location.
Matt: It continues to be a pleasure.
[laughter]
Tracy: Thanks, Matt.
Ross: Miss you so much. Thanks everyone. See you next time. Bye-bye.
Tracy: Bye.
